Joseph S. Stroud: A Current Affair

This week’s edition of the Current contains a question-and-answer between Elaine Wolff, the alternative weekly’s editor, and San Antonio lawyer Mikal Watts, who is running for John Cornyn’s seat in the U.S. Senate.

No surprise there. The Current has written a lot about Watts lately.

The suprise appears in the editor’s note at the bottom. It reads: “Elaine Wolff’s husband, Michael Westheimer, has donated to Mikal Watts’s campaign.”

Maybe the disclaimer should have read: “Elaine Wolff’s husband, Michael Westheimer, has donated to Mikal Watts’ campaign. Wolff noted this only after four separate articles on the Senate race appeared with no disclaimer attached and she had a knock-down, drag-out battle with one of her staffers over the issue, which he said contributed to his decision to resign earlier this month.”

The staffer, Dave Maass, left the Current for good after excoriating Wolff in an e-mail exchange.

“Ethics and conflict of interest aren’t about whether you actually believe one thing or another,” he wrote on Aug. 10, two days after he told Wolff he was quitting. “It’s about whether the public has reason to suspect that there might be.”

Maass urged Wolff to check with various independent arbiters of media ethics, including the Poynter Institute, but she declined.

Wolff defended her decision with equal vigor, though she said in an e-mail to Maass that she would mention the conflict if she wrote about Watts again. She also said she had not made a decision about whom she would support in next year’s Senate race. Finally, she insisted that she had written about Watts critically.

“It’s my position that the fact that my husband made a political donation to a candidate that neither I nor the paper is supporting is not a conflict of interest that requires me to write about it,” she wrote. “It was not a household donation; it was a personal donation — both the law and, frankly, feminist progressive politics, support the notion of individuals within a marriage (or civil union).

“I appreciate you raising the issue, but unless Michael becomes actually involved in Watts’ campaign as a volunteer or staff, I consider this issue addressed.”

The day before, Wolff published a note in a blog called “Chisme Libre” under the heading “Disclosure,” which made reference to her husband’s $2,300 donation and said:

“Because it’s not 1852, and women have the vote, my husband and I often disagree on political candidates. He’s even been known to vote Republican on occasion. How do we maintain marital accord and, even more importantly, my editorial independence? We agree to disagree. But if I say something nice about Watts or negative about Noriega, you can weigh that in.” She was referring to state Rep. Rick Noriega of Houston, who would face Watts in the Democratic primary.

Maass, in an interview Tuesday from Santa Fe, where he has taken his alt-journalistic talents, said he gave two weeks’ notice Aug. 8, which meant the e-mail exchange with Wolff occurred as he was headed out the door. Wolff, in an interview Wednesday, said Maass’ last day in the office turned out to be Aug. 10, in the midst of the flurry of e-mails.

Wolff said she included a disclosure on the Q&A with Watts because “we were giving him a platform.” Given that the interview contained such hard-hitting questions as this one — “You are from Corpus Christi. What is your position on the immigration issue?” — that was the least she could do.

Wolff said the Current’s overall policy on disclosure remained the same. Decisions would be made on a case by case basis.

To avoid a pot-meets-kettle gray area, we looked up our own ethics policy and discovered that political contributions and activities by spouses are not expressly forbidden here at the Express-News, though yard signs and things that could be construed as support by the employee for a candidate or cause clearly are out of bounds. That would apply to a check with both spouses’ names on it (Wolff said her name didn’t appear on her husband’s check, which was drawn on “a personal account”). The E-N policy is silent on disclosure of such contributions by a staffer who writes about the candidate, leaving us in no position to do a lot of sanctimonious clucking about the dilemma Wolff faced. But we think Maass raises an issue worth discussing as we re-examine our own ethics policy, which happens from time to time.

Perhaps more alarming, though, is that Wolff sent an e-mail to the E-N this week saying her Human Resources Department informed her that e-mails are “private corporate property” and that they wanted the ones we obtained returned. Coming as it did from a journalist, this was surprising to say the least. Pressed for her own opinion about it, Wolff eventually said she would use e-mail communications between individuals in a private business if they contained newsworthy information and there was no way to obtain it otherwise.

Still, we hope the standard will be noted by any source out there who gives any thought to leaking newsworthy e-mails to the Current instead of us.